FirstNet promises ‘profound change’ for EMS, official says

“In time-dependent conditions like trauma, we don’t have a lot of time,” McGinnis said. “It’s probably not two minutes, and it’s probably not two hours; it’s somewhere in between.

“What we do know is that, in the event of a car crash, we probably don’t have 20 minutes for that car crash to be discovered, reported and for the 911 system to be activated in a rural area; another 20 or 30 minutes for me to get into my ambulance, get out to the scene and then discover that the patient really is going to die, if we don’t do something. [We don’t have] 50 minutes to get the helicopter up, out and to the scene; and then 40 minutes to the trauma center. That’s time you probably just don’t have.”

One way to save time is by having an automatic crash notification alert from OnStar or another telemetry system be sent directly to the 911 system with all relevant data immediately, McGinnis said.

“When a call comes in, within a minute—not 20 minutes—we know we have a crash,” he said. “We know where it is. We know how bad it is, we know what kind of force was acted on the car and the likely conditions of the patients. That could save us 20 minutes.”

Advanced crash-notification systems also can calculate a likelihood of serious injury to the passengers of a vehicle, McGinnis said. Emergency-response entities leverage this information by establishing policies that dictate when helicopter or extrication services should be placed on alert or deployed automatically when a crash occurs, he said.

“Now, we don’t have to wait for [EMS] to get to the scene to determine that it’s a bad one, and we’ve just saved 20 minutes, 40 minutes or an hour in that time-dependent condition,” McGinnis said. “But the ability to get the data from that car, send it to a processing point and get it onto my smart phone requires a fairly large data pipe.”

In addition, the data throughput via FirstNet could let EMS better understand the surrounding situation, such as where other first-responder entities are deployed at the scene and when other resources may arrive, McGinnis said. Today, such information is provided to EMS personnel only after being at a scene for some time, if it is available at all, he said.

Greater data throughput is also useful when EMS personnel as they work on scene, McGinnis said. They can transmit data from health-monitoring devices on a patient to hospital doctors, dictate voice-to-text notes into medical databases and even establish video chats between the patient and a doctor at a remote location. This information can improve care provided both at the crash site and when a patient arrives at a trauma center, he said.